Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @09:33AM
from the this-is-my-boomstick dept.

Decado writes "Blizzard has just announced that Sam Raimi is to direct the new World of Warcraft movie. 'Raimi, acclaimed director of the blockbuster Spider-Man series, will bring the forces of the Horde and the Alliance to life in epic live-action film. Charles Roven's Atlas Entertainment will produce alongside Raimi's Stars Road Entertaiment.' While it's still early in the process, does this offer hope that someone might finally make a good movie based on a game IP?"

It's interactive. You watch as Frodo the Gnome enters the world at level 1, and kills kobolds to level 80. The sequel features instance PUGging (it's a spring break drinking movie), and the trilogy rounds out with guild drama in raid content (this is more like one of those plotless teeny bopper movies where everyone is depressed and mad at their parents).

How interesting you should pick this movie. In this movie, if I recall correctly, they had three endings. Because the Clue game has many combinations of endings so they tried to include that spirit in the movie. I personally enjoyed it.

Now let's look at other movies based on RPG games like Final Fantasy or Hitman. I must confess I've not seen or played the latter but let's face it, you have a definite ending in the game and you get a definite ending in the movie. Much more tangible to translate to the movie what makes the game so good -- plot (or what you have of it).

Now let's look at games that have no definite ending or story like Dungeons and Dragons. Ever see that movie? How painful. Why? Because it could not embody what makes the game so great: the unexpected. And once it's laid on celluloid, what's done is done. We're not going to watch Dungeons and Dragons and have the dungeon master lay different traps or experiences for the player every time we watch it. And, effectively, the movie cannot embody what I see as the greatest part of D&D. It can't even leave much to the imagination. It was doomed.

I see World of Warcraft following the same path as D&D. You're not going to get the great game mechanics, instances, battlegrounds, unique experience, etc. that you find in the game and package it into a movie. It's bound to disappoint because by definition, it must embody something that cannot contain what makes the game great. You might as well lift the plot from Dune, The Count of Monte Cristo or Lord of the Rings and dump it into the Warcraft universe. This movie has the odds stacked against it. Especially if I am expecting the World of Warcraft experience from it. How do you build an ending to a movie for a game that has no ending?

I see World of Warcraft following the same path as D&D. You're not going to get the great game mechanics, instances, battlegrounds, unique experience, etc. that you find in the game and package it into a movie. It's bound to disappoint because by definition, it must embody something that cannot contain what makes the game great. You might as well lift the plot from Dune, The Count of Monte Cristo or Lord of the Rings and dump it into the Warcraft universe. This movie has the odds stacked against it. Especially if I am expecting the World of Warcraft experience from it. How do you build an ending to a movie for a game that has no ending?

It will cover part of the lore before the timeline for WoW began. All the comments about the movie trying to replicate a repeatative gameplay mechanic have obviously never paid one bit of attention to the game or read any of the quest logs etc. There is plenty of story there. The game must remain static so p

I've been playing WoW for 3-4 years now, and I'm curious as to what unique experiences you're looking for. Getting ganked during the Stranglethorn fishing contest? Spending 40 hours fishing pools in Northrend trying to get the sea turtle mount? Watching some bot-based toon running in circles for some Chinese gold farmer? Spending 30 minutes challenging the door boss to get in to an instance?

While there aren't ends for the players, there are story lines that run through the game. Theoretically, they could easily pick something from the Lich King, the whole Scourge vs. everybody fight thing, but I suspect that pessimism here is warranted. I don't enjoy the game itself, per se. I like having something to do while chatting with guildies. That, and the achievement system integrates nicely with my OCD.

DND movies should have and very well could have been choose your own adventure. They could have worked exactly like choose your own adventure books. Albeit less complicated for some vague sense of fluidity. Released straight to dvd would not have been in issue for dnd movies. The idea of using your dvd player to actually do stuff which would horrify most people would likely not daunt dnd fans. And it could have some moderate replay value. You would of course need to be inventive in making the plot mesh toge

I think they can pull it off with WoW, because while the *game* moves on, various subplots don't. They could totally make a movie about Onyxia or C'thun getting pwnzored, because they can choose from any subplot they darn well please. They could even do the origin of Deathwing and the creation of the demon soul, events which have never taken place in WoW the game but are an important part of the lore.

The thing with DnD is not just that it, as a game, has no definite ending. It just doesn't have the same lore structure to back it up. DnD (from an outsider's perspective, at least) lacks NPCs with names who run around doing important stuff. WoW doesn't lack any of that because of its RTS storylines, which since day 1 have guided the path of stories that WoW has told.

Onyxia was killed, C'thun lies dead, Kiljaden was defeated, and now the Lich King has the Alliance and Horde knocking on his front door crying for blood. Stories in WoW end, even if the game itself doesn't.

Uwe Boll does not count. He makes no movies. He exposes film material so he gets federal movie aid money. Whether or not they do any good in the movies or whether or not anyone comes to see it, he doesn't care, he already got his money.

Basically, my assumption is that he saves a lot of money that way because the plot is, essentially, already there.

I thought that the first Mortal Kombat was pretty good. Aside from that however, I would tend to agree. I also wonder why Raimi insists on making crap film after crap film. Why does he waste his time on licenses like Spider-Man and now Warcraft, when he should be working on the Evil Dead 4!

Hmm... I liked the Silent Hill movie, as well as the Resident Evil movies. Of course I didn't play the games until after, but I felt that they did a nice job getting the feeling of the game into the movie. And then in Silent Hills case, the latest game took some element of the movie which I found interesting as well.

You know what, I'm boycotting any movie from now on that's "based" on anything. Be it a book or a comic or a TV Show or video game or a "reboot" of an old movie series or remake of an old movie or whatever. Give me something original.

Come on...I'd take a "Pan's Labyrinth" or "In Bruges" or "WALL-E" over a "Transformers 1 or 2" or "Batman _____(insert verb here)" or "Warcraft: The Movie".

Good luck seeing any movies in the next...ever.
I'm not even trying to be cynical. It's a simple fact that everything is a rehash of something else. A good portion of the original Star Trek episodes were takes of various Shakespeare plays. The original Battlestar Galactica was mostly re-tellings of various movie plot lines. I took a lit class in college years ago and the prof said something that's stuck with me since - there are only 7 original plot lines to a narrative/story, everything else just changes setting and mixes up the characters a bit. Now, take that with a grain of salt, as I have no links to support that claim.

I took a lit class in college years ago and the prof said something that's stuck with me since - there are only 7 original plot lines to a narrative/story, everything else just changes setting and mixes up the characters a bit.

I did not, I am just relaying what I was told. The prof might have, however. As I said, I have no evidence to support the claim, so I'm more than willing to concede something got garbled in transmission.

1. Rags to Riches
2. Overcoming the Monster
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth
Basically, it's 7 *categories* of plot, identified by Shakespeare. I don't have examples for any of them, but some of them are self-evident from their names, I think.

The Resident Evil series and Silent Hill movie were pretty good IMO. I didn't like the camera angles/controls in RE though (and never tried the rest of the series, though I did see someone playing 3 or 4 and it still looked pretty crap), and never tried Silent Hill. If I was a fan of the games, perhaps I wouldn't have enjoyed the movies..

Keep in mind, the Warcraft universe has a highly developed lore - while the story isn't always a major focus in WoW, it's there, it's been explored in novels, comics and other media - I'd expect the movie to be more like this, a telling of the underlying Warcraft story, than an attempt to translate the game into cinema.

As my good friend pointed out, if you want the old school experience, get 40 people who don't necessarily like each other and organise a time each week for all of them to cram into one room and watch a particular scene. Be sure to rewind the scene when one of them acts like an asshat.

As my good friend pointed out, if you want the old school experience, get 40 people who don't necessarily like each other and organise a time each week for all of them to cram into one room and watch a particular scene. Be sure to rewind the scene when one of them acts like an asshat.

Games, in principle, could make perfectly decent movies(half life could really do with a decent treatment); but I have a very bad feeling about this one.

Because of their business model, MMORPGs have to feature large worlds where large numbers of characters can be the center of attention, to the degree that there even is one. In most cases, WoW being one, there isn't even much in the way of "history" going on. The world stays pretty much the same, no matter what you do, the same NPCs show up, with only th

Games, in principle, could make perfectly decent movies(half life could really do with a decent treatment)

The problem with game>movie transitions is the same problem with movie>game transitions. In both scenarios you have a set amount of people who are going to buy the game or see the movie for no other reason than the name. Since the developer or producer can already count on X amount of sales regardless of how much time or money they put into the project, their incentive to put more than the bare minimum into it is therefore reduced. Until the average consumer can start looking past brand recognition

In most cases, WoW being one, there isn't even much in the way of "history" going on. The world stays pretty much the same, no matter what you do, the same NPCs show up, with only the occasional prescripted changed. That isn't inspiring material for a movie. At best, they'll pretty much have to make a Warcraft movie and just use WoW as a marketing tie-in.

It really depends on the angle they take. 99% of game movies I've seen in the past have been gimmicky films designed as a sequential series of scenes where they show off some specific memorable moment from a game, as if all the games players are going to rise up each time and "OMG!!!! THEY HAZ MADE IT IN LIVE ACTION!!! I LOVE MR BOWE!!!!". It never works out that way, but they keep trying nonetheless. Street Fighter the movie was one of the worst I saw in this. They came up with this contrived storyline

There is major error in the article title, summary, and even very nearly every article out there on the net. To demonstrate, let's go to the actual source of the information, the Blizzard press release [blizzard.com].

The error is this: the movie is not a World of Warcraft movie. The movie is a Warcraft movie. It's a movie set in the Warcraft universe, not one based on the World of Warcraft game. You're right, out of necessity WoW is fairly static - that's how it is that you have content that's consumed again and again

I agree, there is plenty of decent backstory, I just suspect that either the movie will be about WoW and utterly suck or be about some piece of backstory from warcraft, using WoW only for marketing, and have a chance.

No, the movie will be 80 hours long, where the first 79 hours will be the main characters completing meaningless, pointless tasks like collecting rocks or bird feathers and making absolutely no difference in the lives of anyone they encounter, no matter how many of them complete the tasks they are given.

The last hour will consist of them all entering a dungeon while they stand around whaling on a "boss" 300 times bigger than any of them, until he finally dies. The last five minutes is them bickering abou

The movie will be 16 hours long and will chronicle the journey of Frank the warrior on his epic quest to gather seventeen moose heads from the moose spawning area. He makes it to level 12, setting the viewer up for the sequel, where he can finally buy new armour and eat the soft banana bread he was previously not battle hardened enough to eat.

Young Grurk is a hunter of his tribe, and he's set out to conquer the world. He meets some old leader of his tribe who proceeds to tell Grurk his life story, giving the watcher of the show a chance to head back to the lobby to get himself some treats. Then Grurk heads out to collect a few apples, fishes or Murlocheads for his Elder. On his way, he meets the token cleric who has essentially been given the same task, but they both choose to ignore each other. Grurk fi

Raimi also produces the Legend of the Seeker tv series. Make of THAT what you will!

Two things:

1. 'Produces' (actually, co-produces) != has a strong hand in the art direction, storyline, acting, etc. thereof
2. I actually like this show. It's reminiscent of the old Hercules and Xena shows, though not quite as quirky. For a TV fantasy show it has a few things going for it: very accessible plot, attractive females, and respectable fight choreography to name a few.

Sooooo, they can take all three games and make three movies...then reboot the series with new characters from the World of Warcraft campaigns...sooooo...Blizzards trying to launch a big ol' movie cash cow that will last for a decade. I think the Lord of the Rings set a pretty high bar for fantasy films with the sticking point being characters.

However the budget-challenged, direct-to-video sequel to the D&D movie, although not a masterpiece of storytelling, actually managed to capture the feel and pace of playing an old-fashioned late-1st edition D&D game of high level (9th-10th level) characters. If they've continued churning out a series of films in that style, I would have happily bought them up.

Seeings as where 75% of all D&D players out there buy into the "You're a level 1 potato farmer, A mighty wizard has chosen you and your friends to slay a giant and dragon army that has decimated three kingdoms" kind of adventures, I think the movie was pretty accurate.

Seriously, the D&D player base has been a wreck for about two decades now. The D&D film may not have been high art but neither is D&D.

Yeah and what is up with the DnD folks being all teetotalers now?
Back in my day, we were taking LSD, smoking pot and drinking Pig's Eye beer and coffee for days up in Minnesota during the cold cold winter. We had vampire the masquerade as well as our own material, DnD 2nd Ed rules and Rift stuff usually appearing 36-48 hours in, after the 2nd or 3rd tab this usually devolved into legions of naked vampire women fucking and sucking their way across the land while our tank upgraded from being a Paladin to a

If you ask me, a Diablo movie would be heaps more interesting. If done right, with good SFX, this would blow the snot out of so many other fantasy-action movies that managed to make it to the big screen lately.

The story is right there in Diablo II, all you have to do is take it and run with it, collect a party of various fighters and let it roll.

It actually has very good story lines. Most of the larger stories are based on the Warcraft RTS games. There are many questlines which have their own unique stories and are definitely worth it.

I can never stand playing WoW for more than a month or two. After running through the content and storylines it gets quite boring and repetitive. The gameplay itself isn't compelling enough to stay and the PvP is a joke.

After vanilla WoW there was very little fun to be had in world PvP or in the world at large. Battli

This just gave me an idea for a screen saver. It shows your wow character farming gold. Sometimes, a few horde [alliance] guys jump out and kill your character, and you get to watch it make a spirit run back. Sometimes, some other farmer will train a bunch of mobs onto you. Sometimes you'll miss 32 hits in a row (Warriors only) while poisoned. Sometimes, you will also get guild chat talking about faked moon landings, religion, their current middle school experiences, how much weed/beer they just smoked/drank, and you'll get a pre-pubescent guild leader shouting at everyone over vent. I will charge $60 a year to run it on your computer. It will be everything the real WoW experience gives, except cheaper!

I wouldn't normally be terribly interested in a WoW movie, but if Sam Raimi does it, well, perhaps. It's certainly millions of times better than Uwe Boll or Michael Bay. Raimi knows how to make movies fun.

Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?